invezz.com
Solana (SOL/USD) is a growing blockchain network and one of the go-to alternatives to Ethereum when it comes to different development platforms. However, the project recently suffered a major 17-hour outage which it suffered last week, without any indication that something like this is about to happen.
While the community quickly started speculating about what is going on, the project announced in a blog post that it suffered major DDoS attacks that targeted an IDO held by another project, the Grape Protocol.
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The IDO was being held on a Solana-based DEX called Raydium, starting at 12:00 UTC last Tuesday. Soon after that, the project started seeing a growing amount of bot activity within the network. While it wasn’t hard to identify the source of the problems that the platform started feeling, stopping the unwanted activity was a different matter entirely.
The attack featured a transaction load of 400,000 per second. This led to an unbounded surge of the forwarder requests and resource-heavy blocks. Due to its design, the network saw a growing number of various automatic fork proposals.
Meanwhile, the project’s network validators started crashing one after another as they ran out of memory, and the network went down for 17 hours straight, starting on September 14th and returning back online on September 15th.
An impressive community collaboration brought the network back in 18 hours
It is also worth saying that the recovery was made thanks to the collaboration of Solana’s top engineers and over 1,000 validators, who managed to pass a hard fork after also receiving support from 80% of the active stakers within the network.
This is a great example of a coordinated effort within a very well-organized and supportive community that would not be possible to pull off in a lot of other ecosystems. But, fortunately, the network was patched, upgraded, and restored by the 18th hour following the crash.
The post concluded by adding that the community continues to investigate the issue and work on technical post-mortem to find the root of the issue, with the report scheduled to come out after the investigation is completed.